The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) was a research program at Princeton University that studied parapsychology. Established in 1979 by then Dean of Engineering Robert G. Jahn, PEAR conducted formal studies on two primary subject areas, psychokinesis (PK) and remote viewing. Owing to the controversial nature of the subject matter, the program had a strained relationship with Princeton and was considered by the administration and some faculty to be an embarrassment to the university. Critics stated that it lacked scientific rigor, used poor methodology, and misused statistics, and characterized it as pseudoscience. Most of these experiments utilized a microelectronic REG, but experiments were also conducted with "a giant, wall-mounted pachinko-like machine with a cascade of bouncing balls". In all cases, the observed effects were very small (between one and about 0.1%), and although the statistical significance of the results at the P<0.05 level is not generally disputed, detractors point to potential ethical violations and flaws in experiment procedures, as well as questioning the importance of large-sample studies that only marginally clear the p<0.05 significance threshold. Physicist professor Milton Rothman has noted that Jahn's experiments at PEAR started from an idealistic assumption, ignored the laws of physics and had no basis in reality.

PEAR's results have been criticized for deficient reproducibility. In one instance two German organizations failed to reproduce PEAR's results, while PEAR similarly failed to reproduce their own results. An attempt by York University's Stan Jeffers also failed to replicate PEAR's results.

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  • List of Princeton PEAR research publications
  • The PEAR Laboratory - An Overview
  • Princeton University, copy of PEAR website, 2017 archive